


albedo

by proximally



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Nonbinary Frisk, POV Second Person, Suicidal Ideation, a chara-cter study if you will, character study of sorts, explores their life before they fell so:, nonbinary chara
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-04-03
Packaged: 2018-05-31 01:29:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6450007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/proximally/pseuds/proximally
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>albedo, n. - 1. <em>Astronomy.</em> the ratio of the light reflected by a planet or satellite to that received by it.</p>
<p>You reflect, and are reflected, like pieces of a shattered mirror.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Kids can be mean, they say, kids can be mean and cruel, but you are the worst of them. Can’t you see the line in the sand, are you blind? Don’t you understand when enough is enough? Why are you angry when you are so clearly at fault?

You don’t know the answers to these questions. They don’t make much sense to you, so you absorb their criticisms to analyse at some later time, when they do. Then you go crawling back for more, because you can’t fix your mistakes when you don’t understand what you did wrong and they can’t fathom that you’re not deliberately mean, you’re just ignorant.

Except you can’t fathom this either, and this is what you learn: you are a Bad Kid. They can’t help you until you help yourself, and because you won’t _( ~~can’t~~ )_ you are beyond their reach, beyond redemption. You are a Bad Kid, irredeemably, irrevocably, whether you want to be or not. And you don’t, because who really wants to be a Bad Kid? You want to be Good. You want to do well and you want to have friends and you want your teachers to smile, or at least not grimace, when they see you filing into class, but you want a lot of things and you are old enough to realise that wanting something doesn’t make the blindest bit of difference. You can scream until you’re blue in the face about all the things you want from life, but all it’ll get you is bruises and a three-month grounding.

There comes a time when you think to yourself, and decide: I can never be a Good Kid. And if I cannot be a Good Kid, or even a Mediocre Kid, then I might as well be the _Worst_ Kid (because Baddest isn’t grammatically correct).

It is the best and worst moment of your life. You do all the things they tell you not to, on purpose this time, and when they yell at you, you take it as a compliment. You smile at them in just the way they hate, all bared teeth and snarl, and you teach yourself to be pleased rather than ashamed by the way your peers flinch. The first time you smiled at your maths teacher, she dropped her coffee mug on the floor. You got detention, of course, but you’ll never forget the terror in her eyes, or how it made you, such a tiny child, feel so big and powerful.

It wears off, after a little while. They get used to it, and all that’s changed is that you’ve gained a new adjective or two. Bad, stupid, creepy. That freaky kid who smiles all the time. What a weirdo.

You don’t like that much. You don’t like being written off like that, not now that you know what it feels like to _not_ be. So you step up your game. You creep downstairs late at night and watch horror movies for inspiration, and the nightmares they give you only serve as fuel: you want to make other people feel as scared as this. You imitate the faces from your dreams and teach yourself to sneak like the things that walk behind you in the dark, and you become a terror the likes of which they have never seen before. You mess with the lights, when it’s dark and you have detention, on-off-on-off just like in the films. You laugh high and loud in empty corridors, and you creep up on them with your silent step and yell in their ears.

This backfires, though. One is so afraid that they spin and sock you in the jaw, and it _hurts_ , it hurts so much, your pride more than anything because you’re a monster but monsters aren’t scary when a four foot blonde in a my little pony shirt decks them and then you’re all the way back to square one again, except this time you’re _angry._

You pick fights now. Never let it be said that you are a coward, a crybaby, that you are weak; you take this rather to heart, in fact, and if you catch anyone saying the like you give them a crash course in why they’re wrong. You get away with it, for a while, because your peers are either too embarrassed to admit to it or too afraid you’ll come back, but then comes the day that you decide to fight the biggest kid in your school, the star player of the football team and two years above you.

You never liked him, not even way back when you wanted to be a Good Kid. He’s one of the few who just flat-out ignored you, and you hate him for his success: he’s got a talent for sport, but contrary to the stereotype he’s in the top ten percent academically, too. That, and his sister called you ‘it’. (Or she _did,_ before you took your revenge; two weeks later, and she still hadn’t been able to get the neon green dye out of her hair.)

Suffice to say that you hated him, and he hated you, and that’s why when he had a handful of your hair, you sank your teeth into his arm.

You’re expelled, of course, crossing that invisible line for the last time, but you get a savage pleasure from hearing that he'd have to have stitches. It's less fun when your parents turn up to take you home, but that's nothing new: the bruises just take a little longer to fade.

There's no school in the area that wants you, but you're only nine years old and you have another nine before you can be legally free of education. There's no schools for Bad Kids either and your parents can't afford to send you further afield, so you end up at the one that protested the least, forty-five minutes away by bus.

You don't even try to make friends here, or so you tell yourself; it's definitely your own decision and not because your classmates avoid you like the plague. Instead, you take things much the same way as you did before, and the only difference is in your subtlety. You don't want to be expelled again.

You’re not as inconspicuous as you think you are, however, and you end up with after-school detention more times than you don’t - sometimes even for things you _didn’t_ do, but at this point you’ve given up on correcting them. All the teachers hate you, and they’re never gonna believe a word you say. Problem child. Little monster. Bad Kid. You’ve heard them all, but the difference now is you don’t care. Let them call you what they wish. They’ll all regret it, in the end. You’ll make sure of that.

Except that your parents take issue with your persistent troublemaking, and your house life - not _home_ life, _never_ home life - becomes… unpleasant. It doesn’t matter, though; it’s just karma. It’s not like you don’t deserve it, it’s not like you don’t come running when they call your name, it’s not like it’s anyone’s fault but your own, stupid little demon child that you are. This was your choice, and these are the consequences. _( ~~you ignore that you never realised there~~_ ~~was~~ _ ~~a choice.~~ ) _

And then one day, some kid and their friends decide enough is enough. They’ve had enough of your pranks, they’ve had enough of your jumpscares, they’ve had enough of _you_. One of them, the weediest of the bunch, picks a fight with you at lunch - something you haven’t done much of recently, considering what happened last time. The first couple swings, you just dodge and ignore: not worth it, you tell yourself. And then, low blow, he hooks a foot around yours and pushes - and suddenly you’re sprawled on the ground, sandwich crushed into the dirty tiles and scrapes on your hands from the cracks, and all you see is red.

You’re physically dragged away by a teacher, panting and snarling like a wild animal, and the kid’s moaning on the floor and the adrenaline is beginning to fade and you’re realising quite what you’ve just done, where you’re being led, _what’s going to happen to you now_.

You won’t let it.

Before the teacher can react, you’ve bitten him, too, and in shock and pain he releases his grip; you don’t waste a second, and you’re pelting down the corridor, down the stairs, out the front doors, down the street, and you’re heaving now, breathless and spent, hair in your eyes, wet from the rain, but you keep going because _you won’t let it._

You pass a bus stop; there’s a bus there, and it’s not one that would take you home. You pat your pockets, and for the first time this day _( ~~this month, this life~~ ) _ something has gone right: you’ve enough for a one-way journey. You climb up, pay the driver, and when she asks what you’re doing out of school you tell her you have a dentist’s appointment and your dad’s meeting you there. You think it’s a pretty awful lie, but she doesn’t question you further and you take a seat.

You didn’t recognise the place names on the bus timetable, but staring out the grimy window you’re beginning to realise what route this is. You get off at the foot of the mountain, and when the bus driver gives you a look you pat your (phoneless) pocket and say your dad just texted you that the appointment was cancelled, and you’ll catch the next bus going back the way you came, and it’s at this point that you wonder if maybe you _are_ actually a good liar. It’d be the first time you’ve been a good _anything_ , so really it’s more likely that she just doesn’t care.

You’re tired and aching, but you climb the mountain anyway because nobody will look for you there, and you can’t hurt what you can’t find.

Go away, they told you. Get lost. I hope you fall in a hole. You didn’t mean to obey them quite so literally, but here you are. Bad Kid. Stupid good-for-nothing. What do you think you’re doing? Give me that, go to your room.

You’re never going back, though. Never, ever. You’ll die before you do. _( ~~if you do.~~ ) _ You stumble blindly into the cave, rain in your eyes (definitely not tears, because Big Kids don’t cry and Bad Kids aren’t crybabies), and when you trip and fall you mostly just feel surprise, and relief.

When you wake up, though, you panic. Everything hurts, and you can’t move your arm, and you can’t feel your foot, and though there’s a part of you that says: _good. This is good_ , there’s another part, a much larger part, that screams for help. It’s a stupid part of you, a damned stupid idiot part, because you’re more alone down here than you’ve ever been and nobody can hear you.

Ha. That’s funny.

If a child falls down a hole in a mountain and nobody hears them scream, do they make a sound? You’re _hilarious_ , and your sobs of pain become a fit of giggles because that’s literally the funniest thing you’ve ever heard, and you’re broken and twisted in every sense you know and you’re going to die here all alone, but you might as well die laughing - out of _spite_ , if nothing else.

But somebody comes.

He’s not like anyone you’ve ever met before, even aside from being an entirely different species. He _cares._ He tries to help you to your feet, and when you yelp at his touch (that arm is definitely broken), his expression is pure concern for your well-being, and that’s something you’ve only ever seen directed at someone else and it makes you _squirm._ You don’t deserve that kind of worry. He fetches his mother, who is about three times your height but so full of motherly distress that she’s hardly intimidating at all. She pokes and prods, sometimes painfully, but you think you’ve definitely got a concussion because you let her. Then she runs a huge soft paw down your broken arm and you think, yep, that concussion is way worse than you thought, because the pain seems to fade. You can feel your foot again. Breathing suddenly comes easier.

“I am sorry, my child, healing magic is not my greatest strength,” she tells you, and you’ve never heard that tone of apology from any adult and before you know it you’re patting her hand in consolation. She smiles at you, and it feels like a flower is blooming in your chest. Or maybe that’s just the cracked ribs speaking. Either way, you need to leave. Find some dark corner, and stay there. Forever.

They end up taking you home.

You’re lucky they found you, says the kid. A few days later and there’d have been nobody _to_ come. He and his family - and indeed most of the monsters around here - would soon be moving to the other end of the cavern.

Monsters, you think.

Asriel insists you take his bed for the night and, despite the guilt you feel for the healing, for the food you ate, you’re hurt and tired and for a goat monster he has impeccable puppydog eyes. Asgore (who’s even bigger than Toriel, but somehow _even sappier_ ) fixes up another bed in Asriel’s room, which you don’t think looks very comfy but it seems that he couldn’t care less because he has a new friend! Which confuses you for a moment, and then you realise he’s talking about you and you have to hide your face in your tattered sleeves so he can’t see you blush. He’ll only make fun of you, like everyone else does. Tomato-face. Lobster-kid.

Clearly your efforts were in vain, because you hear him giggling. Your face burns more in response, and you hide your entire self under the blanket. You’re such an _idiot,_ why are you still here…?

Something boops your nose.

You open your eyes, and there’s Asriel, right there under the blanket with you, a big silly grin on his furry face. You squeak - squeak! you! - and scramble away, except you forget that just because your arm and chest and leg don’t feel as bad as they did doesn’t mean they’re fully healed, and the new stab of pain startles you into falling off the bed. You land on your arm. It hurts, and you can feel the tears forming in your eyes but _hell_ if you’re giving in this time. You cried already today, you’ve had your time for weakness.

None of this stops Asriel from racing out of the room in a panic, calling for his parents, and right now you’d like nothing more than to be absorbed by the floor. You do the next best thing, and crawl underneath the bed, then curl up in a ball in the far corner. It doesn’t matter that it hurts your chest, your arm, it doesn’t matter so long as they can’t find you, because if they can’t find you…

“My child?” Toriel, but the heavier footsteps behind hers tell you Asgore is here too. She doesn’t sound angry, but then, they don’t always. Sometimes the nicest voice means the worst, and anyway they’re blocking the door. The only exit. You scrunch yourself up tighter, and try not to breathe.

“Um...human?” That’s Asriel, and, god, don’t you wish it wasn’t? “Oh! I just realised I never asked you your name!” He seems less like a lion-goat monster and more like an excitable puppy. Good grief. “Um, where are you, anyway?”

There’s a tap-tap-tap of his claws on the floor, getting closer to the bed, then he lifts away the blankets that had fallen off the bed with you. You try scuttling backwards, but you’re already as far back as you can go without merging into the wall. If ever there were a time to develop superpowers…

Then suddenly you’re staring into his big reddish-brown eyes. And are those… are those _tears?_ Oh, now you’re in for it. Not only did you undo all Toriel’s healing work, you’ve also made her son cry. You want to ask Asriel to distract his parents, just for five minutes, just so you can find somewhere else to hide, but even if you weren’t trembling so much, frozen and mute, they’re _right there._ They’d hear you. And you deserve it, anyway, don’t you? You’re the one at fault here.

“Oh!” he says, chipper as ever, and you don’t understand why…? “There you are! Are you okay?”

Slowly you nod your head. You’ve barely spoken since you fell, so you don’t think he was expecting more.

“Oh, that’s good! I thought you got hurt when you fell off the bed, so, um, I went to get mum,” he says; you don’t think you’ve seen anyone look more sheepish, and did you just make a pun? _god,_ there’s a time and a place. Asriel looks away from you for a moment, up where his parents must still be. “They say they’re okay!”

There’s twin sighs of relief and a few more exchanged words before you hear them leave.

“You look _reeeeally_ uncomfortable,” says the monster, conversationally, and you nearly leap out of your skin. He crawls under the bed and lays down beside you. One ear flops over your foot, and you really, honestly can’t stop the giggle that escapes you, despite it making the pain worse. He grins. You hide your feet immediately, and it turns into a pout. You stick your tongue out at him. He copies you, and soon you’re fighting for your life in the Battle of the Silly Faces, and Asriel is giggling so hard you worry he might choke. Then he beams at you, wide as he can, nose all scrunched up and his blunt little fangs on show, and before you know it you’ve reciprocated: that horror-movie smile you practiced every day in the mirror, so often it’s become muscle memory. He bleats in surprise, and you freeze.

You didn’t mean to do that. You know that it’s scary (that _you’re_ scary), and maybe you’re suspicious but Asriel has been nothing but nice to you, and now you’ve ruined everything. You gather your knees up to your chest again, and bury your face like you want to bury your whole body. You idiot. You wreck everything, always, don’t you remember? Your eyes burn with unshed tears, and your lungs ache from the suppressed sobs, and it’s all so _stupid,_ just like y-

There’s a tentative pat on your arm. “Um?” says Asriel, and you swear there’s an edge to his voice, like he’s about to cry too, and that’s all your fault, _aga-_ “Are you okay? I...I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you! That face you made… it was really cool! Could you show me again? I promise I won’t yell this time.”

He…

He thinks your creepy face is cool.

He thinks _he_ scared _you._

You uncurl, slowly. He’s looking at you, all concern and worry, and you just want him to _stop._ Can’t he see it’s wasted on you?

“Hey, wait! I forgot to ask your name again!”

It’s on the tip of your tongue, but then you think: I hate that name. I’ve always hated that name, so why not just… pick a new one…?

It feels like a lifetime ago, but you used to be fascinated by astronomy. It was an easy, cheap distraction. Late at night, when you couldn’t _( ~~wouldn’t~~ ) _ sleep, you’d crawl over to your window, slip behind the curtains and just sit there, staring into space, until your eyelids began to droop and you dozed off with your face still pressed against the glass. It always gave you a horrible crick in your neck, but you kept at it regardless. You liked to think that, somewhere out there, there was an alien spacefleet heading your way; whether they would exterminate humanity or just abduct you depended on the day.

Maybe picking one’s name should be a little more ceremonious, or at least better thought out, affair, but Asriel is watching you expectantly and after a few moments’ thought you say, “Chara.” That star, you think, is your favourite. Rolls off the tongue nicer than ‘HD 10307’, at any rate.

Asriel eagerly sticks out a paw, which you take. “Hi Chara! I’m Asriel!”

You can’t help the smile that steals its way onto your face and, though you can _feel_ your cheeks going all red again, you think maybe, just maybe, everything will be okay.

… until the two of you crawl out from underneath the bed, and your ankle gives out when you try to stand up. You definitely feel like becoming one with the floor again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if people tell you something long enough, you will believe it, and then you will become it.


	2. Chapter 2

Awareness comes in fragments, and so gradually that you don’t notice at first - though perhaps this is more due to how you never expected to even _be_ aware. You remember how the buttercups tasted like death, and you remember your insides burning like you’d swallowed a star; you remember smiling through your tears, for Asriel, for your parents, for yourself, and you remember deliberately misleading them - _a normal human sickness, it’ll all be over soon…_

And then it was. You don’t remember dying - you’d passed out long before then - but maybe that’s a good thing. (Certainly you can recall the second time well enough.)

You never expected to wake up again, but when you did you felt _fantastic_. Pain-free for the first time in an eternity, and with such _power_ thrumming through your veins - you felt like you could lift Mount Ebott with just one hand. You felt like you finally understood what it was like to be a monster, to have all this magic at your command - it was _exhilarating_.

Until you realised that you were crying. And that you couldn’t move. And that you - your body - was lying lifelessly in front of you, your hand entwined with...your hand. _Asriel_ , you thought.

He didn’t stop crying the whole time. From when you picked up your own body - god, it looked awful, but for all its faults it had carried you this far - to when you stumbled, half gone, back into the throne room. You’d felt sorry for him at first, maybe even guilty ( _your fault your fault yourfault_ ) but ultimately irritation won out. This was the _plan_. You’d _agreed_ it, the both of you. _I’m hurt, Azzy, don’t you trust me?_

All you needed was six human souls. Six measly, worthless souls, to free all of monsterkind. That’s no contest, surely.

...It was. To Asriel. And so you both died for his _idiocy_.

You wish you’d stayed dead the first time. Your job would’ve been done. You’d still have been with Asriel, as much as a dead human could be, but you’d have been at peace, probably. You’d at least never be able to hurt your family again, and that sounds close enough to peace to you.

But no. No, of course not. You just had to wake up and make everything worse; you’d forgotten that you destroy everything you touch, hadn’t you? And here you are, waking up again. This is the third time, you think, and you’re really hoping here that it’ll be the last. You’re tired. You’re thirteen years old, and you’re tired of life. You should just die already. You’ve tried enough times.

_You shouldn’t think like that._

That’s not your voice. It’s not even a voice at all, actually, but hell, you literally just woke up. Give yourself a break.

_I don’t know who you are, or w-what you are, or why you’re in my head, but you shouldn’t think that way about yourself._

_… What?_

_Sorry, that was rude. But I don’t think you were ever in my head before, so I guess you’re, um, a monster…? Sorry, that sounds rude again._

_Uh, it’s fine?_

_So you are a monster? I was gonna ask Toriel, but then I thought maybe that would be even worse…_

_Uh, sur- hang on,_ Toriel?

_Yeah, she saved me from an evil flower. She’s really tall, and she has soft paws. Do you know her?_

_…No. I just thought I knew the name._ There’s silence for a moment, before you ask: _… What are you even doing?_ Certainly it’s not much: they’re just… sitting here. Slumped against a wall, in a corridor you recognise…?

 _Waiting,_ they reply. _Toriel asked me to stay here while she took care of something._

_...And you’re still here because…?_

You can feel your - their? - eyebrows scrunch up. _Because she asked me to?_

_Oh, come on. Live a little. Go explore! Do something fun!_

_I’ll just get lost. And Toriel wouldn’t be able to find me._

_No, you wouldn’t. Not with me around,_ you tell them: you definitely recognise this corridor. You’re not sure why exactly you’re here when you’d died at the other end of the underground, but life is just confusing like that. _I could probably show you where she is, anyway._

_...Okay._

As you guide them through Home - or the Ruins, as they call it; you wonder how much time must have passed for this place to become so dilapidated - you learn a little about them. Their name is Frisk. They’re eleven and three quarters. They prefer butterscotch over cinnamon, but only because they’ve never tried cinnamon. Their favourite colour is purple, and they climbed Mount Ebott to disappear.

This offends you on a personal level.

For having known them for all of an hour or two, they’re the nicest human you’ve ever met. Maybe even monster levels of niceness, which is something you’d never have believed possible if you hadn’t seen it with your own two eyes. Or _their_ own two eyes. Whatever. That someone like _this_ , a Truly Good Kid, wanted - and _still_ wants, you can hear it in all the sentences they don’t say - to die, just like you did, just like you do… That makes you angry. That makes you _determined_. You’re going to help them get their happy ending -  whether they want it or not.

_C’mon, Frisk, just one more left turn and then there’ll be pie! Cinnamon is great, you’ll see._

_Hey, don’t ruin the surprise._

_Oh, come on, she won’t care. She’s nev- uh, she’s_ not _what I’d call subtle._

(You don’t know this, but they’re making that exact same promise to you.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i think it’s really interesting to recognise other people in someone. you can listen to them, and think: ah. someone significant in your life says that a lot. you’re always taking in little pieces of other people: your mother’s favourite phrase, your sister’s pronunciation, your teacher’s handwriting. i like how it’s the same in Undertale; Chara picked up Toriel’s fondness for puns and long words, and Asriel Asgore’s greeting. Flowey got his ‘kill or be killed’ mentality from Chara, and at one point was inspired by their suicide. 
> 
> i think, sometimes, you don’t realise how much you affect the people around you, or how much they affect you.


End file.
